Why DesignX? Designers and Complex Systems

For many years, together with a number of design educators, I have been discussing how design can address the complex socio-technological systems that characterize our world. The issues are not new: many people and disciplines have grappled with them for some time. But how can design play a role? Do our educational methods, especially the emphasis upon craft, prepare designers for this? What can design add?

In Fall 2014, a number of us found ourselves in Shanghai where we were serving as advisors to the newly formed College of Design and Innovation at Tongji University. (The list of participants appears below.) We decided it was time to act. As a result, over the next month we wrote a position paper, describing the nature of the issues and the framework for working on the problems. We didn't know what kind of design we should associate with this approach, and after many iterations on a name, we simply called it X—as in the algebraic variable that can take on multiple values. Hence, DesignX. The next section presents highlights from our statement.

DesignX is a new, evidence-based approach for addressing many of the complex and serious problems facing the world today. It adds to and augments today's design methods, reformulating the role that design can play.

DesignX is particularly suited to and specifically aimed at problems involving a mix of human and societal needs where solutions involve technology. Most of these problems involve networked systems of people, groups and artifacts, including intelligent systems, partially or fully automated, with different levels of communication among components. DesignX focuses on the resulting complex mix of networked natural and artificial systems.

Complex problems require complex solutions. To accomplish this requires a team composed of all the disciplines relevant to understanding the issues and potential solutions. Teams must be problem-based, with all the required members bringing their talents to bear on the problem in a cohesive and collaborative way. DesignX designers must work closely with people from many disciplines, building upon their knowledge and methods, applying whichever method is most effective for the problem at hand, negotiating the multiple constraints, interests, and differing perspectives of all the participants.

Problems are more volatile than ever before, and information often changes faster than it can be validated. This is why we need a new research tradition to explore the issues involved in models of education as well as models of practice. We need a theoretical foundation to support new ways of research and education. We need an innovative and inclusive social eco-system to enable the application of new knowledge and methods for positive social and economic change. And we need to develop new methods of experimentation to allow rapid assessment, test, and deployment of prototypes, test trials, and even mock "solutions," the better to give rapid feedback and allow for repeated iterations toward superior results. The mantra should be 'learn fast, learn continuously.'

Education must also change. Today, universities are focused upon discipline-based education that no longer suffices to deal with large, complex problems that involve multiple disciplines, technology, art, the social sciences, politics, and business. We need robust, new models for education, some based upon disciplinary skills, others based upon problems rather than disciplines, where experts and students from many backgrounds work together on a specific issue. This requires adding problem-based education to the existing emphasis upon disciplines.

Why DesignX?

1. What is new? Haven't designers been doing this for some time?
2. The role of the designer. Do designers have any special expertise for these problems? Complex problems of this sort—sometimes called wicked problems—have been around a long time.
3. What of craft skills? Are we denying their importance?

What is new?

The fact that designers are already involved in these issues strengthens our case. Yes, numerous design firms and design programs have tackled complex, messy problems. But we have no established mechanisms, no rigor, no history of the use of evidence-based methods. This is a general problem in the design community, where much of design work is driven by the skills and intuitions of designers. Even our cherished methods such as design reviews and critiques, and even the human-centered iterative methods that I teach and use myself have minimal evidence that they are more effective than other methods. So what is new is the goal of codifying the approaches, of developing procedures and methods that can be tested, so that for each method the strengths and weaknesses are well understood, including the situations where they might be effective as well as those where they are inappropriate.

Several fields already claim the territory, in particular systems science and service science. They already understand the complex interactions among multiple stakeholders, the mix of technical, political, social and cultural issues, and the need to modularize and prioritize, the need to gain the trust and understanding of all stakeholders. Designers need to incorporate their findings.

Designers are doers, makers and practitioners who think by drawing, sketching and testing. Systems and Service Science can provide a firm scientific basis for their work. Practitioners must always work beyond the understanding of science. Even in engineering disciplines, the practitioners use scientific knowledge, but must invariably go beyond it, for science never captures the elusive issues that always occur in practice, where the environmental factors, the particular biases and requirements of the multiple stakeholders, plus the unexpected events that continually occur in the world elude even the best scientific understanding.

The role of the designer

Designers bring multiple talents to the solutions of complex issues, but first and foremost in my mind is the incorporation of empathy, of incorporating the needs of the people who must work within the system, the people who must approve it, and the people who are to benefit from the resulting system. This is a complex task, for the word "people" in each of the categories of the previous sentence sometimes means individuals, sometimes groups, organizations or even political entities.

Most of the existing professions who approach these complex, messy problems do so from an organizational or efficiency perspective. However, the people who are being served as well as the people who must provide the actual results (those "behind the scenes" in service design terminology) have to be part of the solution, for ensuring their understanding, trust and comfort is essential to the overall success of the enterprise.

For designers to fulfill this need, there must exist reliable methods, methods that have been empirically tested so that their strengths, weaknesses and appropriate ways to deploy them are understood.

What of craft skills?

We certainly do not suggest replacing the traditional work of designers in the development of products and services. Graphic design, communication, interaction, industrial and product design all continue to require great skill and craft. But these superb, excellent skills are not powerful enough to provide solutions in the complex socio-technological systems that characterize the focal point for DesignX.

DesignX requires new skills and knowledge. It requires combining the expertise of multiple disciplines, forming and leading teams with different backgrounds, interests and values. It requires the understanding of these complex systems. Above all, there is that word "systems." Designers are usually trained to produce relatively simple products and services. DesignX ups the magnitude of the issues being faced to those that might involve entire communities with hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, with individuals, groups, organizations and technology both simple and complex, sometimes autonomous, working according to their own rules and programming. For these problems, we need new training, new skills and new methods.

Don Norman claims his goals in life are to make a significant difference, but to have fun while doing so. he has just established the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego which he intends to grow to become a major center for design with a focus on the application of human-centered design principles to complex sociotechnical systems, such as healthcare and automation. He is both a businessperson (VP at Apple, Executive at...

Don Norman claims his goals in life are to make a significant difference, but to have fun while doing so. he has just established the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego which he intends to grow to become a major center for design with a focus on the application of human-centered design principles to complex sociotechnical systems, such as healthcare and automation. He is both a businessperson (VP at Apple, Executive at HP and a startup) and an academic (Harvard, UC San Diego, Northwestern, KAIST). As co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group he serves on company boards and helps companies make products more enjoyable, understandable, and profitable. He is an IDEO Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He gives frequent keynotes and is known for his many books including "The Design of Everyday Things," "Emotional Design," and "Living with Complexity" (which argues against simplicity), and a completely revised, updated edition of "Design of Everyday Things."

Read more

2 Comments

Don Norman...What are you referring to? Planning international airports in the developing world, designing highway systems or the centralization of healthcare?
"Codifying the approaches to design," is an outright stab at regulating creativity is it not? Who does this codifying of the approaches to design really benefit?
"But we have no established mechanisms, no rigor, no history of the use of evidence-based methods." This observation ignores the existence of trade secrets and the protection of intellectual property. There are legal reasons why this kind of information is kept from the establishment.
The standardization of approaches to design seems to me antithetical to what drives design in the first place. There are reasons design is different from science.
Best of luck in trying to get design to conform to the protocols of the medical field. It is indeed a large undertaking.

A Collision of Intentions, Thoughts and Avatars: that's my current definition of a service. The idea that an organization can package and delivery a service (or value) is industrial, scientific, old-fashioned and does not come close to explain the dynamics that take place in the real world. That is...

I spent the first 36 years of my life living in the UK, more than half of which was spent in and around London. As such, I have a deep personal affinity to Gin, that wonderful, complex, delicious spirit made famous by the Dutch and infamous by Hogarth. Gin has...

Hacking away at San Francisco's Freespace, a pop-up space for artists, designers, developers and other creatives.I've been spending a lot of time at hackathons lately. It's not a surprise; here in the Bay Area, hackathons and coding sessions are a way of life, a social scene as common as a...